There's a stereotype that people who like to write about music eventually become jaded. After years of sawing through one stack of promo records after another, the thinking goes, critics develop a love/hate relationship with the medium and begin to think of listening as drudgery. Adding some credence to this idea is the undeniable fact that music writers are so often confronted with music they find less than inspiring.
I don't think this has happened to me, personally. I'm more excited with exploring new sounds than ever, and I'm always impressed with how much truly great stuff is out there. I will say, though, that I rarely find a record that completely devastates me. After spending so much time listening, thinking, and comparing different sounds, sometimes I think the language of music has a smaller vocabulary than I once imagined. If it's true that anything is possible in art, it's equally true that 99% of the people making it couldn't give a toss; they're perfectly content to find a way to express themselves by building directly on the past. And there's not a thing wrong with that. Innovation, after all, is not the same thing as quality.
Every once a while, though, I hear a record that has a truckload of both these qualities, and I get that coveted "blown away" feeling. The Boredoms' Super Ae was one such record, and Mouse on Mars's Idiology is another. Just about everything I love about music these days is on this album somewhere, and it has made me so very happy.
The key word when Jan St Werner and Andi Toma sat down to make this record was "more". More melody, more instruments, more singing, more sounds, and more noise. Almost half the eleven songs feature vocals of some kind, all of them sung by the band's versatile drummer Dodo Nkishi. These range from the hyper-processed "Actionist Respoke", with its oddly funny, high-pitched screams, to the dense, layered harmonies of "Presence", where Nkishi channels the fragile harmonies of Yes.
Strings and horns are all over Idiology, and throughout I'm astonished at the odd and beautiful ways Mouse on Mars combine traditional orchestration with electronics. "Subsequence", for example, opens with a tough, funky digital groove that reminds me of what I imagined Prince's mythical Black Album might sound like before I heard it. And then, just a little over a minute in, an acoustic grand piano joins the fray, playing chords that, I swear, seem lifted from Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue". The first time I heard it, I did a doubletake and then realized how rarely I feel genuinely surprised by a piece of music. My admiration only grew as clarinets, violins and French horns folded into the charming and rhythmically irresistible track.
Even more leftfield for Mouse on Mars is "Presence". I've heard others compare it to Robert Wyatt, but my prog background is limited, so let's just agree that it sounds like a song from a time when bearded men were interested in expanding the boundaries of rock. Those hoping for a more contemporary reference point might consider Gastr del Sol. Like the best tracks on Camoufleur, "Presence" is baroque pop, thick with virtuosic electronic detail. From the angelic but not-quite-catchy melody, to the words (which seem to be about either the phenomenology of being or Led Zeppelin's seventh album), to the folky, horn-drenched coda, "Presence" is dense enough to dissect over the course of a hundred listens.
I love fact that Idiology can contain both the nouveau prog of "Presence" and "Doit", which is industrial reggae as played by Tom Waits's Rain Dogs band, complete with pedal steel guitar. More than any other song here, "Doit" shows that Mouse on Mars can write interesting lyrics when so inclined:
And the ship up there that wants to leaveFilled up to the brim with childrenHangs a little while, but the stringIs wearing-- silently
If the additions are what make this record distinctive, what's left out is what makes it brilliant. The brief "Paradical", probably my favorite track here, illustrates the point. It starts with two chords that sound played on an out-of-tune piano with ball-peen hammers. A strange and lovely melody in an Eastern scale enters, first on synthesizer, then on subtly building strings. Finally, as the small orchestra completely overtakes the track and the beautiful melody is fully unveiled, the song disappears. Like this 49-minute album, "Paradical" is over much too quickly. But desire is more interesting than satiation, which is why God invented the repeat button.
